Marriage Equality
Australian Timeline Ticket A108: Norrie is back at the registry office, but this time for marriage equality - Michael Safi , The Guardian (2015) "When the history of Australia’s marriage equality movement is written, save a paragraph for ticket A108. It was the stub Norrie clutched while waiting at the New South Wales registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Sydney on Wednesday. The activist, whose high court winhttp://www.smh.com.au/nsw/neither-man-nor-woman-norrie-wins-gender-appeal-20140401-35xgt.html last year established a precedent that the state must recognise a third, non-specific gender, had returned on another errand: to file a Notice of Intended Marriage to long-term partner Samuel Choy." "To no one’s surprise, the application to marry was rejected. It’s right there in the 2004 amendment to the federal Marriage Act: marriage is the union of a man and woman to the exclusion of all others. Norrie was circumspect, saying the staff were “bound to do their job”. The pair asked for the decision in writing, so they would have something to appeal against." Abbott's opposition to marriage equality will cost the Liberals for years to come - The Guardian By Jeff Sparrow, August 29, 2017 "Tony Abbott and other Liberal conservatives still imagine they can build a winning constituency from the no side. Instead, he has wrapped the party in impossible tangles" For young Australians in particular, opposition to marriage reform just seems bizarre, a weird legacy of a prejudice they’ve never endorsed. And now they’re voting. The Australian Electoral Commission has revealed that 90,000 new voters – most of them young – have registered since the poll was announced, a number it calls “extraordinary”. Something like a million Australians have either updated their details or enrolled for the first time – and, once they’re on the roll, they’re legally obliged to participate in future elections." In the Quarterly Essay entitled Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott, David Marr describes the young Abbott launching himself into Sydney University politics by attacking gay students for “perversion”. Publicly identifying himself “an infrequently practising heterosexual and drunkard” (truly!), Abbott opposed the legalisation of homosexuality. His friends remember the way he baited lesbians during political arguments. Marriage equality and being trans: The legal grey areas in gender and the Marriage Act - Joni Nelson, Archer Magazine (2017) "You don’t need your birth certificate very often, but for some reason it is the one document on which marriage rests. If you’ve changed your birth certificate gender to “Indeterminate”, as Norrie May-Welby famously did in 2010, you can’t marry anyone. Other than that, if you have a vagina, I am a woman who can marry you today. In most cases, the law boils down to “Penis and vagina go together.” Say it out loud in a 5-year-old kid’s voice." Lyle Shelton Finally Makes Sense: Yes, It’s All About Gender - New Matilda By Tim Deane-Freeman, September 29, 2017 "The fact is that, despite their official claims, those who support the “no” campaign aren’t arguing for the preservation of an institution they feel is sacred, special or deserving of protection. Their relative indifference to heterosexual “sins” like divorce and pre-marital relations constitutes a deafening silence. Their arguments emerge entirely from the firm belief that homosexuality, gender fluidity and non-binary identification are aberrant, disgusting and morally nefarious." "The grist of their position, and the reason they feel no need to formulate it in persuasive terms, is a profound cultural fear of same-sex attraction and gender fluidity, which they exploit with virtuosity. The Liberal Party’s costly outsourcing of internal politics to Australia Post and to the Australian people has afforded them a unique opportunity to attack exactly those people they, like many Australians, have long lived to hate, those who do not accord to a rigorously heteronormative performance of identity." "We need to be sure that we understand, explicitly or implicitly, depending on the context of our interventions, that this is not a debate simply about marriage. It is a debate about the way in which we understand human difference. For LGBTQI+ Australians, regardless of how they might feel about the trifling question of marriage itself, it is an existential debate, one in which, as so often, reactionary and repressive forces are allowed to aggressively question their very modes of being." References Category:LGBT Category:Civil Rights